South Africa's Project Coast: "Death Squads," Covert State-Sponsored Poisonings, and the Dangers of CBW Proliferation

On 11 April 2002, approximately seven months after the devastating terrorist attack launched by al-Qaida operatives on United States soil, a South African judge acquitted Dr. Wouter Basson, the Project Officer for the secret South African chemical and biological weapons (CBW) program, Project Coast (later Project Jota), of all that remained of the 46 criminal charges originally filed against him by state prosecutors. Several years’ worth of controversial, high-profile hearings and judicial inquiries thereby ended with a whimper rather than a bang.